May 2023
A Couple and Their Country, The Telegraph
I have had a long-standing interest in South Africa, and in 1995 briefly contemplated moving there to work. The country had just had its first multi-racial election, and the great Nelson Mandela had been elected [...]
April 2023
Appreciating Ambedkar, The Telegraph
In my personal list of books every Indian must read, four stand paramount. These, in order of their year of first publication, are M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), B. R. [...]
March 2023
Chipko@50: A Legacy Scorned, The Telegraph
On the 27th of March 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alakananda Valley, stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening them [...]
January 2023
India Against Gandhi, Financial Times, Weekend
Born in 1958, a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards the Mahatma. One of my great uncles helped edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a pioneering initiative in [...]
December 2022
Attenborough Revisited, The Telegraph
This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Attenborough’s papers are located in an archive an hour’s train ride from London. Visiting them recently, I found several files [...]
November 2022
In Praise of Ian Jack, The Telegraph
In the course of my life, I have met many remarkable men, who have distinguished themselves as scholars, writers, artists, sportsmen, scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists. These men, almost without exception, have had a high [...]